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kevinstronglydislikes-blog · 10 months

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But I know there's a mirror in every room of my Mind Castle, and through it everything is distorted. The castle in ruins. Decrepit, vandalised. A dark, rolling cloud plainly visible through the half-collapsed ceiling.

And a shadow version of me, always there, doing the same things I'm doing... but when I'm drawn to look into the mirror, I always catch his eyes. A glance turns into a staring contest, and I'm overcome with his pity for me, his negative perception rippling out and changing the real. The change begins with the wilting of the tulips I have in in the room. Taking life away.

The window crashes open by a torrent of air, flipping open my journal - memories, thoughts and ideas ripped out by a poltergeist. The window shatters.

Outside, the sun is quickly devoured by a rolling tide of clouds. Everything in the room with an on switch comes to life on cue, clicking and whirring and beeping and bopping, a cacophonic symphony of doodads reaching a high, painful register at the bounds of their electronics. The crescendo punctuated as they explode from the stress, taking out the overhead lights with them.

The wind is throwing furniture over, now, and the noise floor rises - the window a broken vocal chord strummed to a breaking point by the wind, picking up the slack from the electronic choir that hit their mark on a death note.

The wallpaper begins to peel back as the wind grabs onto long horizontal strips, and they start flailing against the walls, the room itself thrashing in the last few moments of drowning.

And despite the world ending around me, I can't look away from my doppelganger. It's me. That's me. We're both the same.

We *deserve* the same. Sooner than other times, a thought threads the needle with an angel dancing on it in my mind, and I convince myself that...

...No. There are two sides and I'm standing on this one.

In the past, I would stand frozen, letting my world implode. Looking at myself in the mirror and thinking "you deserve this."

In the past, it would take so, so, so long. I would eventually break the gaze and at the flip of a switch the wind would stop the assault. But the damage had been done, and I would then have to begin picking up the pieces.

In the past. Now, it's different. Now, I meet his gaze with compassion instead of fear. Instead of an invasion, there is a crossover. Instead of my world collapsing it feels like the earth rumbling and the wind *does* rise - but on his side of the mirror, the black tulip petals on the floor float back up to the vase, catching the one brief ray of light fighting through the clouds, and as they pass through the beam they return to their vibrant palette, collecting like a school of fish resting into an immaculate arrangement defiant amongst the condemned.

On my side some plates are shaken off of the table, crashing. I walk closer to the haunted looking glass, my mirror match now becoming silhouetted by the fireplace roaring to life behind them, the flames gasping for air and heaving with strength, radiating a warmth across the room.

I stand next to the mirror, now, ignoring the rattling building I occupy and raising my palm the the glass. He raises his palm to mine.

He looks scared.

I sweep my arm over to one side of the mirror and back, using it as a paintbrush for sunlight. I keep sweeping, back and forth, cutting through the dark clouds on his side. The clouds are deep and my effort seems futile, until I finally break through - a long blade of sun crashes into the dark manor and cleanses the room, an arc of colour running diagonally across the walls, to the floor, and outside. I stop and lower my hand after seeing a result. The gap in the clouds collapses like a wound healing. My reflection is standing now, at the precipice of the beam that had... had barely hit him. But the streak of colour bisecting the room is indelible. He is still scared. Tears are bunching up beneath his eyes but he struggles to hold them back.

My eyes open, his closed, I walk through the mirror and give him a hug. I tell him I love him. I break from him for a moment, giving him the second he needs to look into my eyes and draw strength from the truth. I walk over to the tulips and remove a pink one from the bouquet. I am back in front of him, now, and I take his hand. Before I can place it into his, he begins to cry. His truth is that when I give it to him, it will turn to ash. I give him time to find my eyes again.

I give him more of my strength. Upon his face, hope breaks through. It's as powerful as the sun, and I place the tulip into his hands. It does not wilt, or turn to ash. I hug him once more and step back through the mirror, leaving him. My mirror match smiles briefly. He watched as I sweep up the broken plates and tidy up the furniture that had toppled during the quake. He turns to his table, grabbing a drinking glass and placing the tulip inside, placing it near the fireplace.

We will meet each other's gaze again. It used to take so, so long. Now, it's different. Now I meet his gaze with compassion instead of fear. My world shakes and rattles. But I love everything and everyone in my world, including him. It just took me a while to figure that out.

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rosepetalmark · 4 years

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flowers in your hair

↬ Johnny Suh x Reader ↬1.8k Words ↬Your allergies and creating art are two things Johnny holds dear to his heart

You hated the outdoors. Anything to do with bugs, dirt, and even plants made you itch and sneeze and scared that you’ll get some rare unknown disease and die because the innocent looking flower you picked by the bench turned out to be poisonous.

Johnny on the other hand, enjoyed nature and embraced it to its fullest. Every day he’d make time to bask in the grass, and soak up all the sun while working on his latest art inspiration.

Today, he decided that sitting in a field full of sunflowers would be ideal for his newest project, and what would make it more worthwhile and perfect was if you, his girlfriend were with him to occupy his time and add further enjoyment to his favourite hobby.

Horrible idea on his part because you’re allergic to flowers, and tall fields of grass would most likely break you out into hives and have you coughing up a lung. Johnny wouldn’t bat an eye though, because despite loving you with all his heart, he had a knack for making fun of you and the simplest inconveniences that occurred within your life.

He always says you’re over dramatic when it comes to your ��spring allergies” and that nothing like some water and the fresh air will clear your mind and nasal passages.

He’s a dumbass, and he really will be the reason you die one day.

But Johnny didn’t care, because as long he had you, a bottle of allergy medicine for your sneezing and itching, and his paintbrushes, he was content, even if you spent a great amount of your time in this damn sunflower field teary eyed and stuffy nosed.

“Johnny, please tell me we can leave soon, I'm itching way more now than I did when i had the chickenpox as a kid,” you whine, rubbing your hands across your bare arms to provide you with any relief as you watched the bees swarm past you in their search for some nectar in the flowers nearby.

“Mhm,” he whispers, continuing to stroke the paintbrush across the now detailed page, completely oblivious to the words that just left your mouth.

This always happened. Whenever he took you somewhere new, he’d completely block out the world, yourself included, in order to capture the essence of life whether it be through his camera or canvas.

Of course there was silence, why wouldn’t there be. Every time Johnny asks you to accompany him anywhere outdoors, you always think you’re going to explore and embrace nature, and every single time you are wrong, because the second you find something beautiful to look at, he sets his small backpack down and busts out either his camera or painting utensils to capture it.

You’d say it pissed you off at times, but art is his passion, and you’d never do anything to get in the way he feels so alive and free whenever he consumes himself with something as minuscule and simple as a paperclip. He finds the beauty in anything and everything, never ceasing to amaze you with the wonderful creations he illustrates.

“Johnny,” you say a little louder, unamused with the silence you receive, and the continuous strokes he continues to make on the page.

You call his name again, and again, and again, and it’s only the third time when you yell out his full name, that he finally drops the brush on his palette and focuses his attention on you.

“Were you not listening to me?” You question, seriously surprised that out of all the times you’ve called his name, he either completely ignored you or has gone def within his 25 years of life.

“Oh, I was listening,” he hums, raising his eyebrows whilst providing you with his staple cheeky grin, one he always does when he wants to get on your nerves.

Always a cocky one that guy, and how you manage to stay dating him truly blows your mind.

Sighing, you focus your gaze away from the way he picks up his paintbrush again and gently strokes baby blue across the page, looking towards the tall stocks of sunflowers gently breezing in the wind a few feet away from you.

“You’re such a crappy boyfriend,” you chuckle, picking up one of the untouched pastel crayons and examining its fluorescent blue hue. “You never pay attention to me.”

“I never pay attention to you, hm?” He asks, causing you to stare back at his now stoic stature, face still focusing on his notebook and nowhere on you, but more contoured and rigid this time.

“Well, you’re speaking to me now yet your attention is never on me, always on whatever you’re painting or drawing,” your tone slightly angered.

Obviously you were lying. Johnny was the most attentive boyfriend you could ever ask for, always checking in on you and ensuring your day goes smoothly, always hanging out with you when he’d rather be napping or out painting or doing photography, and almost always is down to make out with you whenever the opportunity arises.

You just like to pull his leg most of the time because it’s funny seeing how riled up he gets when he believes that you think he’d rather focus on his hobbies over having conversations with you.

“Here,” he signals, shoving his book in your direction, encouraging you to look through the worn out leather book he kept hidden for months, wanting you to see what he has been working on secretly whenever you were together.

Confused, you run your fingers along the enclosed ribbon on the cover of the sketchbook, hesitant to allow yourself in the work he’s immersed himself in for hours whenever the beauty in nature took over his attention span away from you.

Raising his eyebrows, he nods in a manner that demands you open the book. “If I don’t pay any attention to you, look through the book.”

Untying the string , you decide that whatever is in this book isn’t a secret anymore, because it wouldn’t even be in your hands if Johnny didn’t practically throw it at you to shut you and your curiosity up.

The first few pages are beautiful, really. He has a way with his sketches, always seeming so simple yet so realistic you’d think they were actual pictures edited just to appear more striking to the eye.

“Nature really is what inspires you hm?,” you ask, more of a rhetorical question because you already know the answer that’ll come from his mouth.

Chuckling, he brings his body closer to yours so his chin is resting on your shoulder, watching as you delicately turn the pages of his book. “Yeah, but there’s something more encapsulating that ends up being my muse, just keeping looking through.”

Golden sunflowers, vibrant pink sunsets, the giant pumpkin you both visited at the fall fair last year, everything you two experienced together when hanging out was documented in this book and reinvented through his drawings or paintings of them.

And then you saw a sketch of yourself. At first you thought it was cute, because he’d always draw you and all your other friends whenever he got bored. But four pages later all you found were several pages filled with you, ranging from when when he placed different coloured tulips in your hair that one time you went on a walk in the new community garden not far from your favourite ice cream shop, or when you experimented with makeup and put glitter all over your eyebrows.

Every moment you deemed minuscule and fun was captured so deeply in Johnny’s eyes, that he decided to relive it all again through the many strokes and colours that seamlessly came together to create something so beautiful.

Your breath was absolutely taken away.

You always thought nature is what captured Johnny’s attention the most, but turns out it’s always been you.

“I’m. Wait Johnny this is so-,” you begin to say, but your words become jumbled and your emotions a tangled mess, leaving you with tears in your eyes and so much more love for him in your heart than you’d ever had before, all because he drew some pictures of you.

“Do you like them?” he questions, raising his eyebrows, awaiting your answer of approval, his question only promoting the waterworks to begin and your head to aggressively nod.

You place the notebook gently on the blanket you two were sitting on, and crawl into his lap, pressing your body closer to his as you wrap your arms around his neck.

They were absolutely perfect. He was perfect.

Everything Johnny Suh says and does is absolutely incredible and you’re so incredibly lucky to be dating the cheesiest, most loving goofball the earth has to offer. Even if he’s a giant pain in your ass 97% of the time.

Pecking his cheek, you stare into his gleaming brown orbs. “I absolutely love them, Mr. Johnny Suh, and I love you a million times more.”

Tightening your arms around his neck, you couldn’t help but embrace this moment for much longer. You don’t care that you’re five seconds away from bursting into hives and that your throat feels like it’s closing up. Holding on to your very sweet, thoughtful boyfriend for as long as you could right in this moment was all that mattered to you.

“I was joking by the way, I know you care about me alot and pay more attention than most boyfriends would and I appreciate you tremendously.” You could start to feel the tears well up in the corners of your eyes, because you honestly don’t know what you’d do without Johnny.

He was your best friend, and has been such an uplifting, inspiring person ever since he entered your life your freshman year of college, the thought of him not being in your life one day was a scary thought you never wanted to come true.

“I love you always.”

“I know babe”, he whispered, kissing your cheek and running his fingers delicately through your hair, trying to calm you down as he could sense you were feeling rather overwhelmed.

“I wouldn’t keep dragging you to places you hated if I knew you didn’t love me,” he exclaimed, bursting out into a loud, body shaking laugh that provided you with the comfort to let your tears go, and laugh in unison with him.

Lifting you off his lap, Johnny grabs his art supplies and gently places them in his bag, grabbing your hand and pulling you up from the dry, matted grass you were both sitting on.

“Where are you dragging me?”

“Back to my place.” He winks, quickly pecking your lips before intertwining his fingers with yours, pulling you into the direction of his car.

“It wouldn’t be romantic to be making out with my girlfriend that I love very much in a sunflower field if she kept sneezing in my face, wouldn’t it?”

#johnny scenarios #johnny seo #johnny suh #nct #nct 127 #nct scenarios #nct scenario #nct 127 scenarios #kpop scenarios #johnny nct #nct fluff #nct soft hours #johnny suh scenarios #nct au #nct 127 au #johnny fic #nct fic #nct blurb #johnny blurb

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nerdybubblebee · 6 years

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Transcendent

Chapter 1: Once Upon A Dream

Chapter Summary:

A new life, a new reality, a new world, a new start. Thus, begins our tale of two souls, destined to find one another to rekindle a love that was forged many, many years before their time. Will this love story unfold as it should? Will two strangers be able to fall for one another? Or will they flee from their fates?

Ao3 link here: Prologue. Chap 1.

Enjoy~ I hope this cheers people up after the prologue hehe :)

Credits of the mood board go to @midqueenally. Couldn't have made it without your help~

“Oh, bugger.”

His elbow connected with a paintbrush lying on its side, sending it toppling head first over the edge of his workbench. Its bristles were still wet with paint as it plummeted through the air, coming to land on the floor with a clatter. Reaching down to grab his trusty paint brush, a bright splash of colour caught the painter's attention. On its way down, the brush had streaked a line of orange across the blank canvas that was propped up against the leg of his easel. The orange paint adorning the canvas conjured up a vision of fire, flashing through his mind.

Scorching Dragonfire.

He needed to paint.

Lifting the canvas from the ground, he set it on his easel. Uncapping his paints, he squirted several dollops of them onto his well-used palette. Settling himself upon his familiar stool, he picked up his brush, moistening its tip with water before dipping it in the paint and set to work.

As a prodigal artist, Jon had been painting all his life. Strokes came easily, almost naturally as his mind wandered freely through his imagination. His mother used to say that he was born with a paintbrush in his hand and given some paint, he could create pictures that captivated everyone that laid eyes on them. When he was a child, no more than seven, a number of his art pieces had even been displayed in art galleries and sold for extremely high prices. All he needed was some paint, his trusty brush and his hands would do the rest. He simply smiled every time Catelyn Stark would gush about his achievements at such a young age to her friends. Those were moments when he felt so glad to stand out for once from his five siblings who all had an artistic, scholarly talent of some kind. Nowadays though, he preferred the anonymity more, selling his work mainly online through his shop to anyone around the world who wanted to buy them.

Besides his artistic gift, he was born with a unique quirk - the ability to lucid dream. Since he was old enough to remember, his nights were plagued with dreams of a life he never lived. Or at least he thought so. How could he have? The images and words that appeared in his sleep were nonsensical almost. Words, and sentences, meaninglessly circulating in his head. They were too outrageous.

As a boy, he saw himself training outside in a castle courtyard, alone, training on a dummy with a wooden sword. That image of the lone boy who looked like him always filled him with loneliness. As he grew older, he saw glimpses of himself wielding a real sword, hacking at the gruesome zombie-like creatures, cutting them down. He saw himself scaling a wall of ice. He saw himself riding on the back of an emerald green fire-breathing dragon.

He told his parents about them but they always shrugged it off and said it was just his overactive imagination. They all felt so real to him as if he were transported out of his body in his sleep and plonked into a medieval world. His dreams were uncanny but his nightmares were things of terror. During his nightmares, he saw himself being stabbed repeatedly. It was so real that he felt the pain of each stab to his torso and the last one to the heart. He felt his life slip away, as his blood seeped into the snow under him and he succumbed to the cold embrace of death. For a long while, there was only darkness. Until, he awoke with a start, drenched in cold sweat and heaving. Instinctively, his palms drifted to his chest, searching for the seven distinct stab wounds that marred his body in his dreams. There would be none, expect a dull ache beneath his crescent-shaped birthmark above his heart. Every nightmare was the same. All he saw was his death. How could something so horrific be real?

He had no inkling why he had these dreams. Nonetheless he knew he had to do something, something to remember them by. A voice in his mind and heart told him these dreams were of crucial importance. So, he did what he did best. He painted them all since he was a boy. The collection grew from scrap pieces of paper, to sketch pads to canvases that currently lined the walls of his art studio. He kept them all. Over time, he even began incorporating some of the things he saw in these fleeting dreams into his regular art pieces. His customers seemed to love them quite a bit.

Lately, his dreams have evolved somewhat, to include someone new. He saw a woman. He didn’t know her name, but she was the most beautiful person he had ever seen. Every part of her was, from her silver hair to her piercing purple eyes, her plump peach pink lips and smooth alabaster skin.

It was like looking through a window into an alternate reality. He would see the man who wore his face with this beautiful lady. They were so happy together, so in love. The utter adoration that shone in the king’s eyes for his queen filled Jon with awe. It felt almost intrusive, watching their intimate moments, sharing stolen kisses in alcoves of their castle, holding each other in bed as they drifted off to sleep. Would he ever get to experience a love like that in real life? A love so deep, so pure, so strong that it survived through so many losses and wars.

Would he get to meet his own true love? Jon wondered as he added the finishing touches to his painting. True love in this day and age? In a world so full of cynicism and hatred? It's a nice notion but reality is rarely that generous. A love so sweet would most likely be too good to be true.

With each stroke of his brush, his vision of black and red came into creation, fearsome and monstrous.

Drogon.

Adding some black to the golden amber pupils of his mythical creation, the painting was complete. Dunking his paintbrush into the jug of water by his easel, Jon sat back on his stool to appraise his work.

The black dragon with accents of red upon the ridges on his back and the underside of his wings hovered in mid-air with fire spewing from his gaping jaws against a backdrop of white snow and ice, his red-hot flames ploughing through a hoard of dead soldiers, incinerating them to dust.

It looked pretty good if he could say so himself, a near perfect recreation of his dream. With a pleased nod, he reached over to grab the can of fixation spray and sprayed a thin coat over the surface of the painting.

“There,” Jon exclaimed.

His phone rang just then, breaking the silence of his studio. Dipping his fingers into his pocket, he retrieved the vibrating, jingling device. Looking at the caller ID, Jon smiled.

“You’re up early for once little sis. Who are you and what have you done with Arya Stark?” Jon couldn’t help teasing his wild child of a sister. “And on a Sunday no less? You didn’t have a late night?”

“You know I did. But honestly, Jon. Can’t a girl ever be awake at a reasonable hour?” He could hear her annoyance through the phone.

Chuckling, Jon clamped his phone between his shoulder and ear as he placed the cap over his glass jar. He would have to tip out the water later on. “Sure you can. But we both know that a reasonable hour for you starts at noon. Given it’s Sunday, this must have something to do with our mum.”

Arya groaned. “Can’t believe she wants us to go for brunch at this hour. Midday won’t be here for another two hours.”

“It’s good to spend time with the family.” Jon simply shrugged. She couldn’t see it but it came as a natural reaction. “Play nice with mum okay?”

A drawn-out groan came for the other end. Jon imagined Arya having her face stuffed into her pillow. Her eventual grunt and begrudging ‘fine...’ in his ear from the other end of the line enticed a chuckle out of him.

His little sister was a free-spirited, strong-willed young lady. Like all the other children in his family, Arya had a talent as well. Hers was closest to his. She was a part-time freelancing wall mural artist with a knack of graffiti art. Her ideal time to do her work was late in the night. According to her, that’s when her mind is the most active and creativity came easiest. Her current project was a street art gallery. A gallery in the laneways behind buildings where no one usually traversed in hopes that it would encourage people to explore their city more.

“Anyway.... on to more pleasant topics.” Jon heard Arya clear her throat. “I’ll be coming over to Paris in a bit!”

“That’s great! When will you be here?” Jon was delighted. Ever since he decided to move from London to Paris to bask in the culture in the vibrant city of love, he hadn’t seen his family in quite some time now.

Arya hummed, thinking when she could leave her gallery which was very much still a work in progress. “We’ll have to see when we get done with more murals. Iris and I thought it’d be fun to have a short break before we launch officially. Somewhere not too far away from home. So, I suggested Paris! It shouldn’t be long now, we have a few more walls to cover.”

“That’s awesome, Arya! I have no doubt you’ll do a great job.” His baby sister utilizing her dream and talent for good he couldn’t be prouder of her. He couldn’t curb the well of emotions gurgling, welling up to push at his ribs, puffing up his chest. His baby sister was growing up so fast. “I’ll give you the biggest hug you’ve ever received as a reward when I see you.”

“A hug? That’s it? Thanks so very much.”

“Hey, didn’t you once say I gave the best hugs?”

“I was five and in desperate need of comfort after scraping the skin off my knee from tumbling down a hill.”

The siblings laughed together for a few moments before a deep sigh filled Jon’s ear. “I wish you were here though. It’s less fun without you. I miss you, dear brother.” His sister muttered quietly into the receiver.

“I miss you too. I can’t wait for you to get here.”

After saying a quick goodbye to his sister, Jon hung up and headed to his kitchen. Time to get on with his day. First on his agenda, breakfast. An omelette or maybe a sandwich with coffee. Tugging open the metallic door of his fridge, Jon peered inside. “Well....” The fridge was desolately empty, only a lone sad lemon, a bottle of milk that had probably gone bad, condiments and the like, occupied the space. He’d been so busy with his orders lately, groceries were the last thing on his mind. “Cafe down the street it is then.”

Burlap shopping bag now stuffed full with groceries for the week and his breakfast purchased, still warm to the touch, Jon made his way back home. The advantage of living just above a market street meant there was food all around, easily accessible. You just had to step outside. Shifting the bag from one arm to the other, he retrieved his breakfast from its makeshift paper home before taking a hearty bite. The flaky pastry crumbled in his mouth, coating his taste buds with an explosion of rich buttery flavour. Monsieur Seaworth, as the baker liked to call himself, made pastries that tasted like heaven in every bite.

“Jon. Jon Snow.”

Pausing mid-munch, Jon glanced to his right. A lady was standing on the curb outside the fortune teller shop. A chill swept up his spine at the peculiar grin quirking at her lips.

“Umm... My name is Jon yes, but it’s not Snow. It’s Stark.”

The lady took a step onto the cobblestone road, unhindered by his words. “I know your dreams, Jon Snow. I know the things you see every night in your sleep.”

A torrent of goose bumps rose to attention all over his body. Who was this lady? He stood frozen on the spot and his mouth went dry as his stomach began to pitch and roll. How could someone know when he never, ever revealed that part of himself to anyone?

“She has come, Jon. She is here, very close by.” Lifting her arm, she pointed a slender finger in the direction of the bustling market up the slope. “The woman that you see in your dreams.” The strange lady in red spoke, taking another step forward. Jon gulped, recoiling slightly at the quickly diminishing gap between them. The lady kept walking still. Peering at Jon with unblinking eyes, she glided closer and closer toward him, completely unperturbed by the filth and grime staining the ends of her swishing velvet dress that trailed along the ground as she moved.

“Find her, Jon Snow.Go to the place where many people traverse and sell their wares.” The fortune teller implored. Now standing directly in front of him, Jon could see an unnerving gleam in her eyes. Her voice had an oddly serene tone about it almost as if she were reciting, reciting some sort of cryptic prophecy aloud. “You need to find her. You need to make her believe you.”

“Believe? In what...?”

“She won’t believe you until you show her. Show her your paintings.”

As her next words tumbled from blood red her lips, his half-eaten croissant slipped from his slackened grip and landed onto the cobblestone with a mute thump. Jon’s heart leapt into his throat and his blood lost its warmth.

“Show her your dreams.”

Dun dun dunnnn hehe. See ya next time! Thanks for reading!

#iceandfiresource #jonerysevents #jonerys fic #jonerys fanfic #jonerys #jonerys modern au #jonerys fluff #jon snow #daenerys targaryen #jon snow x daenerys targaryen #got fanfiction

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micaramel · 7 years

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Artist: Jack Whitten

Venue: Hauser & Wirth, London

Exhibition Title: More Dimensions Than You Know: Jack Whitten, 1979 – 1989

Date: September 27 – November 18, 2017

Click here to view slideshow

Full gallery of images, press release and link available after the jump.

Images:

Images courtesy of the artist and Hauser & Wirth, London. Copyright Jack Whitten. Installation photos by Alex Delfanne; Individual photos by Genevieve Hanson.

Press Release:

Hauser & Wirth is pleased to present Jack Whitten’s first-ever solo exhibition in London and the gallery’s inaugural project with the artist in the United Kingdom. Whitten is an American abstract painter celebrated for his innovative transfiguration of paint in works equally alert to materiality, politics and metaphysics. Mentored by both Willem de Kooning and Norman Lewis, with a career spanning five decades Whitten holds a unique place in the narrative of postwar American art. Curated by Richard Shiff, this presentation has a historical focus, bringing together a large number of Whitten’s paintings from 1979 to 1989. These years marked a period of intense experimentation for the artist and reflect his intellectual engagement with contemporary changes in science and technology. Whitten’s work is a focus of ‘Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power’, on view at Tate Modern until 22 October 2017.

Whitten’s diverse practice bridges gestural abstraction and process art. He experiments ceaselessly to arrive at a nuanced language of painting that hovers between mechanical automation and spiritual expression. The common denominators across the many phases of Whitten’s artistic practice – which he describes as ‘conceptual’ – are zealous technical exploration and a mastery of abstraction’s potential to map geographic, social, and psychological locations, particularly within the African-American experience. To account for his experimental attitude to materials, Whitten recalls his time as a pre-medical student at Tuskegee Institute (today Tuskegee University) in the 1950s. He once said, ‘[It was] an all-black college where the African-American scientist George Washington Carver did all his experiments. His laboratory is still intact. He was also a painter. I’m convinced today that a lot of my attitudes toward painting and making, and experimentation came from George Washington Carver. He made his own pigments, his own paints, from his inventions with peanuts. The obsession with invention and discovery impressed me’.

Uniting Whitten’s work from the period 1979 – 1989 is a process analogous to electronic imaging and photography. Inspired by photographic technology of the time – cathode-ray scanning, radar, electron microscopy – he conceived of his painting as a process of transmission, channelling the subjective qualities of a person, spirit or sense of time and place, through a coded repeatable unit. Hence, we see the dedication of certain works to notable figures, such as novelist James Baldwin and artists Norman Lewis or Andy Warhol. Whitten articulates his approach to abstraction in photographic terms, saying, ‘I maintain that abstraction is a symbol. It’s very much like holding a camera. I can direct it toward any symbol that I choose. As a painter, I have to locate that symbol in the paint, as opposed to giving an illustrated narrative. The narrative content and the figure are still in there – they’re built into the paint’.

In 1980 a fire devastated Whitten’s studio, resulting in a three-year hiatus in his practice. In 1983 The Studio Museum in Harlem, organised the exhibition, ‘Jack Whitten: Ten Years, 1970 – 1980’ curated by long-time champion of the artist, Henry Geldzahler. With the prospect of a new show, and aided by Geldzahler’s curatorial reflection, Whitten’s return to the studio ushered in a prolific new phase of painting – he returned to the gesture of the hand, working with small, self-designed tools and reintroducing the paintbrush. He began by developing a series of circular oil and acrylic reliefs that call to mind systems of celestial navigation. Using a trammel head, Whitten incised arcs, lines and concentric circles into quarter-inch-thick acrylic planes. The dashed lines reveal buried layers of primary colour underneath a large swathe of black or grey, as if to offer a glimmer of a hidden cosmos. The artist describes these works, including ‘Annabelle II’ and ‘To My Valentine’ (both 1984), as ‘just explosive – geometry and a lot of gesture’.

1985 saw the artist introduce wire mesh netting as a tool, using it to create a grid on wet acrylic. Each small square is coloured individually, creating a canvas that flickers like a distant metropolis. Its pixel-like elements derive from grids designed for electronic scanning. The artist would return to a similar use of units of colour in the late 2000s with a series titled E-Stamp.

Whitten refers to his DNA paintings as having ‘a unified surface that opens to multi-dimension’, which seems to describe a raster (a pattern of parallel scanning lines followed by the electron beam on a television screen or computer monitor). Curator Richard Shiff explains the artist’s process for this series saying, ‘like a light-sensitive photographic film, a pictorial raster awaits its activation, as if differentiated tonalities might be projected from within the surface as much as from without. Whitten generated a raster by applying a grey slip over existing abstract imagery and then raking the slip in a horizontal direction to create a set of lines that, from above, ‘developed’ the image below. He repeated this process vertically to complete the grid. The grid of parallel lines connotes the raster of an electronic imaging system; in contrast, the scattering of variant greys beneath the lines resembles the irregular distribution of tone in the emulsion of analog photography’. The raster and image compete for visual attention as one and the same surface, resulting in a painting with strong photographic depth. In ‘DNA III’, ‘DNA X’ and ‘DNA XII’ (all 1979) it is as if a layer of netting obscures a blurred vista beyond.

Also during this period, Whitten first conceived of the surface of his painting as ‘skin’, associating the incisions and marks with keloids (scarring after skin is cut). Whitten would apply the concept of ‘painting as skin’ to objects, and he developed a series of collage-like reliefs from acrylic castings of objects and surfaces he scavenged from around the city – using plaster of Paris he would take moulds from man-hole covers, car tires, and walls that were later cast in acrylic paint. Titled ‘site paintings’, for Whitten these works are complex topographical maps of the urban landscape. The matrix of lines and shapes incorporate, and figuratively recover, lived experiences and histories of the urban environment. In works such as ‘Site I’ (1986) and ‘Site IV’ (1986), the mottled texture and monochromatic colour palette create the illusion of shifting planar space and set the relief surface in motion. The brightly coloured, vibrant works ‘Ode To Andy: For Andy Warhol’ (1986) and ‘Willi Meets The Keeper (For Willi Smith)’ (1987) illustrate an evolution with this technique. Here the castings are layered and set amongst other fragments of cured, acrylic paint that function as a dry palette, and the cast forms lean towards abstraction. Recalling this technique Whitten says ‘I’m dealing now with paint as a collage, paint as sculpture… I don’t paint a painting, I make a painting’.

Animism is founded on the belief that a supernatural power organises and animates the material universe – the Spirit needs Matter to manifest itself, whether that be in nature, flesh or art. Whitten grew up within the Black Fundamentalist Church where animist religious beliefs were not a formalised system of belief condoned by the Church. However, being sensitive to spiritual vibrations, he absorbed the animist presence of spirit as a fact of being. When speaking on this subject in 1998, Whitten said, ‘We are familiar with things being either / or, abstract or representational, but there is a third order out there… an image comes out of matter… I’m aware of something being caught in that matter… There is a relation here when I speak of spirit and matter… it is possible to direct something into that matter’. In the Site works, paint becomes light and matter in one – the low reliefs capture more light than a flat surface, conveying a unique sense of place. By building and embellishing the surface of the canvas he gave the form of low sculpture relief to the animist principle. This is in contrast to the artist’s earlier paintings for which he pushed aside layers of paint to release streams of light and energy seemingly trapped beneath the surface. Whitten’s interpretation of animism is at the heart of his contribution to post-war contemporary art – he extended the vocabulary of modernist abstraction to include a deeper, more spiritual experience of contemporary life.

About the artist Jack Whitten’s work has been the subject of numerous solo museum exhibitions, including the major travelling show ‘Jack Whitten. Five Decades of Painting’, organised by the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego CA (2014); ‘Jack Whitten. Erasures’, SCAD Savannah College of Art and Design, Savannah GA (2012); ‘Jack Whitten’, MoMa PS1, Long Island City NY (2007); ‘Jack Whitten. Ten Years, 1970 – 1980’, The Studio Museum in Harlem, Harlem NY (1983); and ‘Jack Whitten. Paintings’, Whitney Museum of America Art, New York NY (1974).

His work is included in prestigious public and private collections around the globe, including the permanent collections of New York’s Museum of Modern Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, and Whitney Museum of American Art; National Gallery of Art, Washington DC; and Tate, London, England.

Whitten has received numerous grants and fellowships throughout his career, including the John Hay Whitney Fellowship (1964), Individual Artist’s Fellowship from the National Endowments for the Arts (1973), and the Guggenheim Fellowship (1976). In 2014 he received an Honorary Doctorate from the San Francisco Art Institute. Brandeis University awarded Whitten an Honorary Doctorate in May 2016 and in September of the same year he received the 2015 National Medal of Arts in recognition of his major contribution to the cultural legacy of the US.

Link: Jack Whitten at Hauser & Wirth

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from Contemporary Art Daily http://bit.ly/2zN0zGU

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jvzooproductsclub · 7 years

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Colorize Review and Bonuses

Learn more here: http://mattmartin.club/index.php/2017/06/14/colorize-review-bonuses/

Description :

Bring new life to old photos by automatically colorizing them using Colorize. We propose a fully automatic approach that produces vibrant and realistic colorizations.

FEATURES: • Automatically recolor images. • Import photos directly from your camera or photo library. • Save paintings to Photo Library. • Share via Email, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.

Once again, thanks for the support, let us know what your think. Our goal is to give you the tools you need to enhance your photos. We’d love to hear from you!

What Is Colorize?

You’ve seen it all before. ZenTangles, Geometric coloring books, and simple cartoon coloring books. This IS DIFFERENT. With only a photo and a few clicks, you will be able to create a 100% unique coloring book that will make your friends go, WOW!

In this course, I will show you how to:

Transform your photographs into coloring pages for pennies per page.

Find exceptional, free, high quality photo images to supplement your photography, so that you can make a well-rounded coloring book.

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Show you how to maximize your reach through a few social media outlets.

Provide you with a business plan for your coloring book publishing business.

What does the colorize checkbox in the Hue/Saturation dialog box actually do? The documentation says to check it if you want to colorize your image, but I can’t find a description of what colorization actually is.

How Does Colorize Work?

It appears to be similar to the Color blend mode – it keeps the lightness of the pixels the same while converting them to a hue of your choice. If that’s the case, what is the difference between dragging the hue slider with colorize checked, and dragging the hue slider with colorize unchecked? AFAICS you just seem to get more garish colours when the box isn’t checked.

Most of the classic black-and-white movies have been “colorized,” mainly so that they can be shown on television in color. It turns out that the process used to add the color is extremely tedious — someone has to work on the movie frame by frame, adding the colors one at a time to each part of the individual frame.

To speed up the process, the coloring is done on a computer using a digital version of the film. The film is scanned into the computer and the coloring artist can view the movie one frame at a time on the computer’s screen. The artist draws the outline for each color area, and the computer fills it in. The original black-and-white film holds all of the brightness information, so the artist can paint large areas with a single color and let the original film handle the brightness gradients. This means that the artist might only have to add 10 or so actual colors to a scene.

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You can see that his main method is first starting off with the black and white image as a base and stacking color balance adjustment layers. Each adjustment layer corresponds to the area he is working on. It takes many of them to make the final product but the results are worth it.

The interesting thing to note is he erases away at each black mask to reveal the color he has set. His opacity and flow are both set to 100% so it’s an instant reveal. The artistry comes in where he doesn’t use a reference to set a color for each area, he judges it by eye. For instance, after painting in the face, he fine tunes the color so it’s closer to what the actual tone would look like. If you don’t have a defined visual color palette, it can start looking very cartoonish. It’s also trickier than it looks to actually reveal the colors without making a mess.

The first step, as Rojas explains it, is in creating a clean selection of your background. This is what will facilitate the color adding process, allowing you to add color to your background without it affecting the color on your subject. To do this, you can use the selection tool in Photoshop to choose a Color Range, and from there you can select the color of your background, and Photoshop will take care of the rest.

Once you have made your background selection, the process of adding color is as simple as adding a curves adjustment layer to your image. Then you can play with your RGB curves to add the color of your choice into your background. In the case of this video, Rojas chooses to add a little pink tone into his background to complement the rosy cheeks of his model.

Finally, you can use a black paintbrush, used on the curves layer, to paint out the color effect from any areas of the image where the background color change has affected it in ways you do not like or intend. (pink eyes are an obvious example)

So there you have it — a quick and painless method for adding a splash of color into your white/grey backgrounds in Photoshop. Make sure and check out Jeff Rojas over on YouTube for more great videos like this one

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Module #1 – Complete, easy to understand manual

If you learn best by reading a user’s guide, you should start here. The entire manual was designed and written by a native English speaker with over 25 years of professional writing experience. In every section, you will be able to follow along with the creation process with the screenshots that complement the instructions.

Module #2 – Over the Shoulder Training

Let’s make a coloring book together! Watch over my shoulder as I transform photos to line art with just a couple of clicks. Even a child can do it! Even if you don’t have photos of your own, I will point you to the best, royalty-free image locations that offer high resolution, completely free, high quality images.

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In this review, I hope you can find some useful information about Colorize. Don’t hesitate for such an amazing product.

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